Edgar Awards Best Novel

The highly acclaimed author of Over Tumbled Graves and Land Of The Blind delivers another deft and dazzling suspense novel, a tale of petty crime, local politics, and murder set in 1980, featuring Alan Dupree as a fresh young investigator not yet disillusioned by the job. Small-time East Coast criminal Vince Camden was relocated to Spokane under the Witness protection program after serving up a couple of his old buddies to the Feds. In his seedy suburban tract house Vince wakes up every morning at 1.59AM before his alarm goes off, and starts counting all the dead people he knows. On this particular day, Vince feels more paranoid than ever that someone's out to get him. The people he encounters are jittery and out of sorts. But the real games begin when his walk home takes him across the path of detective Dupree at the scene of a grisly shooting.